rFactor 2 is my favorite sim racing game. A complaint I've heard raised somewhat often however, is that the cars handle like they're on ice. I've felt this way at times, as well, and would attribute it somewhat correctly to real road green settings on a new track. I know a little bit about suspension settings. I have a custom fabricated rear swaybar (which I designed) on my daily driver. Once I got some decent lap times down after getting familiar with the cars and tracks over a couple of months, I planned to look at the suspension settings (like camber) on the cars. I don't like to play with them right off, because I like to find my issues before attempting to correct them. Today, I looked at the camber on the Nissan 370z (ISI) while on Loch Drummond and the McLaren MP4-12C (BES - unsanctioned) on Portugal International: 370z: front camber -3.2, rear camber -2.2 MP4: front camber -3.5, rear camber -2.5 Goodness, these are what I'd set them for drifting or something. A first-off sanity change of these to: 370z: front camber -2.2, rear camber -1.2 MP4: front camber -2.0, rear camber -1.0 led expectedly to much greater straight-line and cornering stability. I don't claim these are perfect and I grok that understanding and perfecting these setting should offer some advantage, but defaults past -2.0 seem nearly like sabotage to new players and may be effecting the adoption of the game. Thoughts?
I don't touch front camber but I have changed rear camber to around -1.5 in the Camaro and have had positive results.
I usually run a few laps until the tires and track are set and I just keep the default setups now. I like a low diff on the Camaro, but that's it.
The default setups on the ISI cars Like the C6r and the Camaro are wrong for me! With a proper setup they feel very different and very drivable!
Rfactor 2 on ice ? Gosh not at all, sometimes I think some cars are a tad to grippy lol I hope they don't change anything re.grip levels they have it pretty much spot on
The camber is a little bit extreme and i lower it basicaly on every car too, basicaly what you need to do is the learn the track well to enough to be consistend on it, and then go 10 laps and watch how is the heat distributed on your tyres, if the tyre is the same color everywhere, than your camber is just fine for your driving style, in most of the cases tho you will see that the outter side of tyres is significantly colder, meaning you are not using that part of tyre in most of times, meaning you need to lower your camber. Your driving style matters a lot because if the track has high inner curbs, and you do take them, than high camber is quite usefull as it will gain you a lot of grip, but that requires high driver precision and tweaking for each track, so for mortal drivers, i would recommend setting the camber for flat corners (not taking inner curb at the apex) and that is a lot lower camber
It's not grip levels he is asking to change but default camber settings which either reduce grip or controlability on the limit. Changing the default setup on the Corvette in the demo transformed it from nightmare to nicely controllable.
As a driver who has driven hundreds of miles on ice I have to respectfully disagree those that assert that RF2 drives like on ice. Grip levels in my view are incredibly realistic. I would like to add some things to the points raised. I'll agree with the op and others * on many points! I'll put a link to a rather detailed story about setting up a car for a race but before that I'll make a summary of a couple the things I've discovered. -Cold tyres have much less grip. this and the following may give a bad initial feeling -As stated by OP Green track is very low in grip. Best to run some AI while you have a coffee and talk to your family to rubber it in. Then save that real road to start all future setup sessions. -ISI tend to provide (imo) standard setups with a little too much front camber and a lot too much rear camber. In my view this is beautiful as it starts us all on a journey of discovery as to what works in this single parameter. I have no doubt that ISI have the talent to provide an optimised setup for every car. But where's the fun in that? It opens up a personal philisophical question as to whether you want to dive in and be competitive in lap 1 in every car or to learn them and evolve in your knowledge. For example in the 200 or so laps I spent setting up our Nissan GTR GT1 and testing the C6R for refernce I discovered that the C6R is very strong on corner entry (nice front end) and weaker on corner exit, the GTR weaker on corner entry but stronger on corner exit. In my view this could not be fully tuned out of the cars so you have to exploit their strengths. It was reall a nice feeling learning this (that I assert as) fact -Camber front camber will normally (in a rear wheel drive car) be a much bigger (negative) number than rear camber as the fronts only have to turn the car whereas the rears have to push it as well. Excessive rear camber will lose you traction on both accelleration and braking. High front camber numbers will also offer less stabilty under brakes. So its a trade off to find where you are gaining more mid corner than you are losing in braking/accelleration zones. Optimising camber settings takes a bit of time. For me it begins with trial and error. add or subtract a bit, was that better or worse? then either go the other way or keep going same way. Does the end you are working on have suddenly more grip EG if it's front end have you now got over steer? Sometimes you have to get the other end of the car working well to allow you to come back and continue on the first end. EG The Camaro would not turn in so I had to have poor rear grip to get a little oversteer. Once I had learned from another driver how critical diff lock was and reduced it I got much better turn in and could allow some more rear grip. Once I got more rear grip I could then find some more front grip. There is a motec plugin that will store temps across a session . Now at this moment I'm not entirely sure the tyre model is finished as normally you look for a certain delta across the tyre. The deltas at the minute are huge (20+ degrees), it also seems really hard to get the outside temp reading high enough. But just say it was working the inside will always be hotter as its always in contact and working, eg on a straight the inside edges will do the most work. Mid corner the whole tyre should be working. To get optimums we need a skid bowl and just go around in a circle to reduce the straight line effect. Once you have determined the optimum delta the middle temp needs to be the average of the other two. -Suspension ISI tend to set harder spring settings than optimim imo. these and..... -Shock absorber settings is where the real fun begins, esp slow bump. I have often found 10+ seconds a lap in setup. I like that. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/17063-A-little-tale-of-preparing-for-a-Race-on-RF2
First thing I do in rF2- reduce camber all around. Run a few laps until he car is warmed up and then tweak cambers according to tire heating. More camber up front, less in the rear but not near as much in rf2 as in other sims in the past. My base is usually around -2.3 front, -2.0 rear in modern tin tops. Half that (or even less) in historics.
Great advice. I wish there was an internet guide that gave such practical advice in plain English for every setting. I've stumbled upon lowering camber in this game, but I've been butter knifing it and not doing it with any real intelligence. This is great info to know. A little more complicated, but still easy enough to follow. Time to experiment this weekend.
Mike I totally agree with your points on temp but dont understand the bit about kerbs. If riding the inside kerb the inside wheel is largely if not totally unweighted no?
You might really like this... http://www.freewebs.com/dacia1310racing/Setups/Advanced_F1_Setup_Guide.pdf
Here is super, quick and "dumbed down" camber rules to follow. -Aim for anywhere between 0 and max 10 degrees celcius spread of your tyre temps from outside getting higher temp towards the inside. Now don't just go crazy on the camber, as pressures, ant roll bars, dampers (aka shock absorbers), etc etc all affect this too, but this gives a good idea if you're cambers are way off What about actual handling behaviour? - Positives of more camber gives you more grip the more you are turning, whether it's front or rear. Ex. applying alot of steering lock mid corner, accelerating hard on exit while you are still turning/have lots of lateral/side loading, etc. - Negatives of more camber is loss of grip in the straight-line parts, wether it's front or rear. So basically throughout braking your fronts or rears can lock sooner, or on straight-line power delivery you can get more wheelspin - Opposite of above for less camber for front/rear - Keep in mind! It's not just "maximum camber unless im driving straight". There is a blending over point of when you are straight ENOUGH for the lower camber to help you more than the higher camber. The more camber you have the more you have to turn before you gain it's grip benefits, but that means you loose the grip really early when you start straightening out again as you are starting to exit (and for braking/entry as well), and the lower the camber the less grip you have when turning max but you get more grip the more you are straightening out. So it's more like turning grip vs "the straighter you are" grip..
There is no one perfect camber angle and saying they are too high "just because" is a very false statement in my opinion. You want to have all your four tyres contact patch to be as big as possible in corners (to get as much grip out of them as possible). But how much camber do you need? Well, it depends on suspension geometry design, weight of the car, suspension stiffness (springs and anti-roll bars) - that decides, how much a car leans in corners... but then you have tyres. The more grippy a tyre is, the more car leans in corners if no changes are made to its suspension. Then, tyres of different types and from different manufacturers behave differently. Some are stiff and "prefer" low camber values. Others deform more and require different chassis setup. To give you an example - higher GT class cars were happy with -3.0-3.5 front and about -2.0 rear camber. WTCC touring cars are more like -5.0 or even more negative front camber and about -4.0 or more rear camber. Want to setup camber more or less correctly? Once you are fine with overall setup (springs and arbs), go for a few laps and look at tyre temps in telemetry and see, how it grows in corners. With too much negative camber, outside portion of a tyre might not touch ground at all so temp. rise might be minimal. With not enough negative camber, outside of tyre will gain more temp than inside. Those are two rather extreme examples, but you get the idea. Also remember, everything is a matter of a balance. When you want to gain some front grip under braking and you can't change brake balance, reducing front negative camber will help. More negative camber all around increase v-max a bit (less contact between tyres and road, so less rolling resistance)...
and consider V8 supercars (aussie tintop) run up to about -5.5 to -6.0 in real life some race cars do use massive camber
I don't think that the cars in rF2 have too much camber, at least from a technical perspective. In racing with slicks it is very common to run between 3 and even 5 degrees of camber, depending on various things. BUT! In rF2, i think that because of the tire model still not finalized, the tires work much better with little to no camber. With the Clio or 370z for example, i've been able to run the fastest laps with camber settings ranging from 0,5 to 1,2 degrees. Mostly 0-0,5 at the rear. I hope that gets fixed soon. It should not be the case, especially running slicks.
